Whooopee!

Three weeks ago Peter Townshend had the good fortune to kick a cop in
the balls on the stage of the Fillmore East. Roger Daltrey
contributed a shove. The Who always put on a show. As the officer
did not identify himself and might well have been mobbed to death if
he had, I thought his reaction was less than polite: he charged the
two longhairs with various misdemeanors relating to their disrespect
to his person. For a while he could not be persuaded, even by other
protectors of the law, to abandon the prosecution. This was not only
impolite but ominous, because it portended the imminent banishment of
the third great English rock group. Now, however, Daltrey is off and
Townshend's charge has been reduced to harassment. He will plead
guilty, and if he is careful not to harass any more policemen he can
continue to upset the balance of trade. Actually, you get the feeling
he thinks the next policeman he harasses will be his first. He now
wears a button which says "New York Cops Are Tops," and in the cagiest
political comment in recent memory explains: "I thought he was one of
the Motherfuckers."

Like everything else, it is all for the best. With a little help from
Albert King and Chuck Berry, the group sold out an 11:30 weeknight
show at the Fillmore last week. It was billed "The Triumphant Return
of the Who," and triumphant it was. Townshend added a high kick to
the wings to his stage repertoire of leaps and flails, which should be
just the touch that will turn the group's current American tour into a
royal procession. The reviews of the new opera, Tommy, have been
ecstatic, and it is bulleting and starring its way up the charts:
certain Top Five, probably Number One, already an RIAA-certified
million-seller. The Who will peak just as all the other great groups
enter their dotage.

Townshend, Daltrey, and John Entwistle (who played horn with Townshend
in a pre-rock trad band) have performed together since 1963; Keith
Moon joined a little later. This longevity is deceptive, however; the
Who didn't record until 1965 and only hit their stride in the States
on the tour which followed Happy Jack in 1967. Since Townshend
is a master of commercial usages, the indifferent success of his group
is a curiosity. Despite his creative equipment, he has always
required guidance. Until he met his first manager, Peter Meadon, he
never thought in terms of image, and until he hooked up with his
present advisers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, he didn't try to extend
the images musically. The whole mod youth violence thing which
Townshend perceived at the center of rock--and still does: the live
set always includes "Summertime Blues," "Young Man Blues," and "My
Generation"--finally came together on the great "Anyway, Anyhow,
Anywhere," recorded in May 1965. (It is not on any American lp,
though the single is available on Decca.) The lyrics redefined the
punk machismo of "Blue Suede Shoes" and "The Wanderer," and the
instrumental--pioneer feedback which has rarely been
surpassed--enforced the mood.

Furthermore, the song epitomized the group's break-'em-up visual
presentation, though it has since been replaced by "My Generation."
Both were made for Roger Daltrey, the punkiest of all rock singers.
Daltrey apparently cares about nothing but girls and spade music--he
watched most of Albert (The Interminable) King's warm-up at the
Fillmore while Townshend amused himself with the pinball machine
Graham had installed in the dressing room--and has offended many with
his James Brown imitations. Reportedly, Townshend has a genius for
uncovering the good--the great--in conditions others would reject as
intolerably confining, transforming necessity into freedom. The
tendency in rock has been toward the prima donna and away from the
group, but Townshend has resisted it, even moved in the other
direction, thus preserving one of rock's most interesting qualities:
the group as creative unit. "The only reason I'm successful as a
writer is because I'm a writer for the Who," he says. "The only
reason I'm successful as a talker is because I'm a talker for the
Who." He manipulates the group as skillfully as he manipulates words
and music. Each stage personality modulates Daltrey at the center.
Daltrey projects the grimy heart of rock and roll more purely than
Townshend ever could: he is a not-too-bright tough, not much of a
singer, but absolutely cocky, swinging that mike, missing sometimes
and who cares. Keith Moon has the same intensity, but he is playful
instead of dangerous. Townshend, on the other hand, projects the
danger at a more cerebral and self-conscious level. And John Entwistle
is the burgher on the other side of every J.D.: he just stands there
and earns his paycheck.

Youth rebellion--not merely asserted, but understood and in a sense
indulged--infuses the Who. The same defiance underlies most white
blues, but whereas the constrictions of rock are used by the Who to
strengthen and complicate the message, the open-ended aab structure of
blues lends itself primarily to demonstrations of stamina. White
blues is physical music to the same extent that folk was intellectual.
The unique virtue of the Who is that it is both, which makes the
group, as Townshend says, the only rock and roll band left. A group
like Crosby, Stills and Nash ("They're gonna save us from English
blues," an usher at the Fillmore predicts happily; I suspect there are
very few blues freaks among those who have to hear four shows a
weekend) incorporates rock physicality into its music, but with just
that kind of deliberation: as with all the tight bands, it is
minimized and brought under control. (Exceptions: the Band and the
Airplane, which is suddenly revealed as a tight band. There are also
white blues bands which manage to transcend the purely physical.)
Without surrendering any subtlety, Townshend screeches and gronks
though the whole anarchic routine and Keith just never stops.

All this has been obvious from the beginning. One reason the Who
seems to have been around for so long is that the Who became
everybody's secret band upon one hearing of any record. The problem
was getting the record. The Who made bad mistakes with American
labels. They signed first with Atco and released "Substitute" with
the line "I look all white but my Dad was black" turned into "I take
one step forward and two steps back." (The original version is still
unavailable here.) Then they switched to Decca, which hadn't owned a
hit rock group since Bill Haley and the Comets. Until recently, Decca
has confined its services to collecting the funds which accrued
whenever Kit Lambert, Chris Stamp, and publicist Nancy Lewis came over
from England to push a single like "Happy Jack" or "I Can See for
Miles" or "Magic Bus." After "Magic Bus," Decca also put together an
album of tracks from the can and songs lifted from earlier lps,
disillusioning many unwary Who fans. But now the label has instituted
some personnel changes and old hostilities seem to have softened. The
packaging on the current album is elaborate and a special set of 45s
for radio play has been distributed. As a reward, Decca owns the
group of the year.

This kind of business hassle has destroyed many groups, but Townshend
is grateful, in a way, because it forced him to concentrate on the
stage act and keep in touch with the audience. What's more, because
it forestalled the group's impact, the Who is now competing in an open
field. No one else can offer violence and control and a touch of
pretension all in one package. Suddenly, the group is alone on top,
which will mean at the very least some of the enormous money they
should have been earning two years ago. "Kit is going crazy,"
Townshend says of his manager and producer. "'Peter,' he says, 'we've
finally done it. It's the bonanza, the bonanza I tell you, Madison
Square Garden!' Madison Square Garden--ugh!") It also means a
pre-eminent artistic position from which to create--but what?
Tommy is the last of the grandiose rock masterpieces, a
throwback to that mythic era of the distant past, about 18 months ago.
Whatever follows will be an anticlimax--an exciting anticlimax, no
doubt, but still an anticlimax.

Tommy is not the first rock opera. (How did you miss The Moth
Confesses by the Neon Philharmonic and The Amazing Story of Simon
Simopath by Nirvana?) But except for the Mothers' We're Only in It
for the Money, it is the first successful extended work in rock.
Like Frank Zappa, Townshend has his parodic side, but Townshend's
parody is more profound and equivocal. Tommy doesn't take itself
seriously, which would be fatal, but it doesn't poke such obvious fun
that all of those who want to take it seriously can't. Townshend
knows that the first duty of the popular artist is to try and please
everyone. All his skill would be less compelling if it weren't
tempered by this overriding necessity, which like all the best pop is
simultaneously self-serving and humane. Tommy is deliberately
constructed so that pieces of it--songs--can be enjoyed
individually, and the two long instrumentals (both of which function
narratively and as delicious comments on all the Claptonesque
furbelows of the typical rock solo--they just go on and on, as
peaceful and vital as a heartbeat) come at the end of sides so they
can be rejected with no loss. The kids can take it as a parable of
drugs and mysticism and clamor for "Smash the Mirror"--the group has
apparently abandoned literal smashing, by the way, while the rest of
us contemplate how Townshend has taken these commonplace elements
without being taken in by them. Townshend knows he is no
reincarnation of Eddie Cochran. He is a complicated person with a
bohemian past who grows one year older every 365 days. All of that is
present in the music. Yet he has remained true to the kids.

This determination to give his audience what it wants without burying
his own peculiarity--this constant, even perverse, formal struggle:
it may be, after all, that Townshend is more dedicated to rock forms
than his audience is, though his interest in singles proves that he
wants to reach beyond the Fillmore crowd--is typical of Townshend.
The Who has always been elevated above your everyday anarchist foursome
by a charity which is fairly simple but never credulous. From the
time of "The Kids Are Alright" he has shown a rare compassion for
men-in-general, but of course he can't just write about loving
everyone. Anyone who loves all men automatically is either slightly
loony or doesn't know a whole lot of men. And so the Who performs
many songs about apparent human dregs--beach hermits and dipsos and
fratricides and tattooed men and girls with shaky hands--which have
more than a touch of humor but are always filled with love.

Happy Jack and Mary-Anne with the Shaky Hands are true heroes, and
specific in a way the Fool on the Hill is not. "A Quick One While
He's Away," on the other hand, renders a petty working-class
infidelity with sardonic understatement until the finale, in which the
words "you are forgiven" are repeated in a litany that turns the song
around. The repetition, of course, is pure rock, as are the nonsense
syllables which close "Tattoo," the only words which could possibly
end that woeful tale: "Rooty toot toot/Rooty tooty toot toot/Rooty
tooty toot/Tattoo too."

As part of his love of freaks, Townshend has always shown a cockeyed
interest in the older aspects of religion. He now opens the group's
live sets with a song (I don't know the title) that presents a child's
version of Heaven and Hell--scary, but funny. He is also a longtime
fan of the Meher Baba, the Hindu mystic who vowed silence until he was
ready to die, when he would reveal the secret of life to the world.
Unfortunately, there was no one around to listen when he finally
crapped out, but that doesn't stop Townshend from wearing his Meher
Baba pin. The crazy are wonderful. In "Rael," a fanatic sails to
fight the infidels on the island womb of his religion and instructs
the captain of his yacht to rescue him if things get thick. After he
is gone, the captain says: "He's crazy if he thinks we're coming back
again./He's crazy if he thinks we're coming back again./He's crazy if
he thinks we're coming back again./He's crazy anyway." But the song
ends with the fanatic's instructions repeated, and they sound a little
more wistful this time. Townshend clearly doesn't expect the captain
to return. But he feels sorry for the crusader.

In Tommy, this religious vision, if you want to call it that,
combines with Tommy's fascination for misfits and respect for the
commonalty. The deaf, dumb, and blind boy is straight out of the
tradition of the sainted fool. His disabilities do render him almost
divine. But who wants to be divine if it means being deaf, dumb, and
blind? Tommy makes the error of genius. He assumes that just because
people want to follow him, they should, and he is punished for it: the
rabble that hisses "We're not gonna take it" have achieved their own
enlightenment.

"I'm not a mystic," Townshend says, explaining the ending. "But there
are mystics in the world." Not quite, Peter. In a sense, you are a
mystic. Your music is far more complex than many of those who love it
will ever understand. But you don't make Tommy's mistake, because you
let them take it however it suits them best.

Last minute editing for space garbled the final few paragraphs of my
MC-5 column, in which I suggested that the group might be called the
Male Chauvinist 5 and commended Rob Tyner for his great stage ability,
especially his warmth, which undercuts all the violent bullshit and
leads me to hope that the MC-5's revolution will actually be musical.
More on rock and politics next time--the air has to be cleared.